View Single Post
Old 08-04-2010, 09:12 PM   #15
silvarilon
Member
 
Join Date: Dec 2009
Posts: 144
silvarilon is on a distinguished road
Re: Troublesome Aspects

Easily solved, though.

What we do is "mothball" inactive characters.
So if you're logging in regularly, you pay rent, impact the economy, get sick from diseases, and other such stuff.

If you stop logging in, that continues for some time (a week or so) and then stops. It starts again when you next log in. That way you can take a break for a month, year, or however long you want without worrying that when you return you'll have lost anything much.

But we also wouldn't kill someone from thirst, or drain their bank account from rent...
We might kill someone from a disease (but there is resurrection) - even then, unless it's a fast-acting disease we'd still pause it if the player was inactive.

the other side of the coin, since we try and make players not loose anything by being inactive, is that a lot of players abuse this. If things are going badly for them in-game (it's a social/political game) they will often just stop logging in, knowing that we won't make anything too terrible happen to their character while they're away. They'll wait for things to die down, then return. It means a lot of plots are killed by one of the key characters vanishing.
silvarilon is offline   Reply With Quote